Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 July 2008 22:22:50
For reasons I'm not going into I forgot to post about the interesting visitation we had in church today. Our minister was in mid flow of his sermon and a group of three women burst in. From there accents I suspect they were German, certainly European of some kind.
Anyway they started going on about the way the leaders of the English church would soon face persecution and something about Lamberth and unsaved bishops. They thrust some literature into our ministers hand and then tried to give some out to the congregation before being ushered out by a couple of people and onto which ever place of worship they were going to invade next.
Somehow I felt uncomfortable not only with their invasion but also with the churches reaction to it. They were a disruption to the service and so the chosen course of action after they wouldn't quietly sit down was to usher them out as quickly as possible. Now, I'm not saying they should have been allowed to get in the way of the sermon but....well something of the whole episode, (which I initally thought was a staged drama), didn't sit right. I still can't get my head around what should have happened, but I don't think that it was what did.
Also I felt my own reaction to it was ....well wrong. It was clear quite quickly that these were very conservative evangelicals, possibly fundamentalists who had come to the area as a result of Lamberth. These strangers who had invaded our space in an "inappropriate way" felt like a threat. I wanted them to either sit down and fade away or simply disappear as quickly as possible. I wanted a copy of the booklet but felt that taking what I was being offered would be seen as encouraging them, and not supporting those who were trying to resume normal service as quickly as possible. As an individual I didn't know how to react.
All in all abit of a wierd experience.